adammiller

This Week In Goals

• As the image suggests, let’s start with food! My new dish of the week was grilled lamb cutlets with a basil sauce. I’ve cooked lamb once before, but this was a totally different flavor. My first lamb-cooking adventure was a slow roasted shank - very fatty, very heavy. The better cut, along with grilling instead of slow roasting it in it’s own fat, made this a much better summer dish. The basil sauce (a combination of fresh basil, pine nuts and balsamic vinegar) took the flavor in a totally different direction. I’d highly recommend giving this dish a try. It’s (of course) a Jamie Oliver recipe and he even has a step by step guide to preparing it on his website (link).
• I continued my running blitz this week for a total of 12 miles. I’m planning on running a 5k in about a month and I think I’d like to gradually start building up to a higher mileage per run. My lifting has been confined to light dumbbell exercises, pushups and sit-ups. At this point, all I’m really missing from the gym is doing dips and squats. I think I’ll continue with this anti-gym trend until it gets too cold out for my liking. 
• I started two new books this week. Not sure why, but I felt compelled to start both at the same time. The first was The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I started reading it outside this past saturday and was constantly getting distracted, which made it challenging to keep up with the developing plot. The other book is one I’ve been wanting to read for a while. Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard. It’s a fascinating look at Chouinard’s life and the life of his company, Patagonia. This book is a total deviation from everything I’ve read this year and I’m really enjoying it.  

What I'm Doing This Morning:

1. Waking up
2. Calling Katie and Miles
3. Checking Huffington Post to find out who Obama’s running mate is
4. Watching courtneyc videos from Tanzania (so cool!)
5. Writing this post
6. Getting out of bed
7. Shower, dress
8. Disassembling a piece of IKEA furniture I need to return
9. Breakfast; cooking and eating
10. Getting to IKEA 15 minutes before it opens so I don’t wait in line behind every Pittsburgh college student
11. Running two other nondescript errands
12. Hopefully, back home by noon to do some work

A better week!

I was totally focused and productive this week! ‘Bout time! Here’s some specifics. 

• Exercising:  I haven’t lifted in over two weeks, but I ran a lot this week. I’ve got a new route that I love. It’s just shy of three miles which is a about a mile further than what I had been running on a regular basis. And I finally found a way to use the exercise category as the visual to make these post less boring. 
• Food: For all my cooking talk, I actually only own three cookbooks. A Ratatouille cookbook Miles got me for fathers day this year, and two of Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks. In Jamie’s Dinners, he’s got a section of quick meals made with basic (in the mind of a professional chef) ingredients. I’ve made several of them before and loved them, so I decided to do two more this week. I made a parmesan breaded fish fillet with a cress salad, and chorizo and tomato omelette. Both were pretty good, but nothing too incredible. 
• Reading: Yes, I finally finished Catch-22. Guess I need to get a new book now.